Barn At Bears Copse House

Barn at Bears Copse House, Plough Lane, Waltham St Lawrence

A timber-framed threshing barn dating from the early 18th century, with 19th and 20th century extensions. The building was listed at Grade II as a good example of a vernacular timber-framed barn that, despite extensive alteration, retains substantial original fabric and a clearly legible original layout and function. It also has group value with a roughly contemporary barn to the north-east.

The barn comprises five bays aligned east-west. The western three bays form the original structure, with enclosed bays flanking a central threshing floor featuring large doorways to north and south (the southern doorway is now blocked). The northern entrance has been extended with a tall projecting cart porch. Two later bays to the east include a first-floor gallery. A series of lean-to extensions are built against the north wall: a row of three stables to the east of the cart porch, and a small storage room to the west.

The main barn is a gabled structure with a steeply pitched roof topped by a weathercock above the western gable. The south wall is weatherboarded with small inserted windows at its eastern and western extremities. The east wall has large double doors and a small square window in the gable. The north elevation is brick with a series of extensions: a tall central cart porch with full-height double boarded doors and an overhanging hipped roof supported by diagonal struts; to the east, three stables with half-doors beneath a shallow lean-to roof; and to the west, a small storage room with a partly hipped roof. The main roof is of corrugated asbestos, with Welsh slate over the stables and clay tile over the storage room.

The interior displays the original timber-frame construction across earth floors. The three original bays have close-studding walls with two intermediate rails between cill and wall plate, and diagonal bracing between wall-posts and wall-plate. Some studs in the north wall have been lost and the posts reset on brick plinths. The two intermediate roof trusses are of queen-post construction with curved braces running from posts to tie-beams and diagonal struts reinforcing the queen-posts between tie-beams and principals. The western end wall has a central vertical post rising from ground to the middle of the tie-beam, braced by diagonal struts, with another post extending from tie-beam to collar. The eastern wall was removed during the extension, but the surviving truss shows similar construction. The roof has two tiers of purlins: the lower ones are staggered and tenoned to the principals, the upper ones clasped between collar and principal. Many common rafters have been replaced, though some curved wind-braces survive. The middle bay of the south wall retains a cranked beam that once formed the lintel of the blocked southern doorway; empty mortices mark where the jambs have been removed.

The cart porch appears to be the earliest addition, with simple timber frame and brick infill walls. Its hipped roof is supported on the wall-plate and lower purlin of the main roof slope, with original common rafters cut away to accommodate it. The two-bay eastern extension uses light softwood framing with a gallery supported on two rows of posts. Contemporary stable extensions to the north-east have tiled floors and softwood lean-to roofs. The storage room interior was not inspected.

The building was probably constructed as a threshing barn in the early 18th century, with the middle bay serving as the threshing floor and flanking bays for storage. Later, a covered porch was added to the northern entrance to shelter carts delivering and collecting corn from the farmyard. By the later 19th century, agricultural mechanisation made the traditional threshing barn redundant, and the building appears to have been converted, possibly for hay storage. The southern door was blocked and the main barn extended eastward in two phases with an upper floor inserted in the new section. Ancillary structures for stabling and storage were added, and the north wall rebuilt in brick. The original roof covering, probably thatch, was later replaced with corrugated asbestos.